this afternoon at 3:00 p.m. the house rules committee will be meeting to set debate rules for the thursday and friday house floor action. we'll have live coverage of that meeting. it should start some time after 3:00 eastern time today. before that, though, at 2:30 p.m. eastern, federal reserve chair janet yellen will be holding a news conference to discuss monetary policy and the nation's economic status. you can watch that live here on c-span 3. now, though, it's a forum on defense spending hosted by the center for a new american security. >> we'll keep moving straight away. my colleague laura schulman and i are going to talk to you about defense innovation. so defense innovation is very

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fashionable term right now in general and for defense i would say it's dangerously fashionable. if you look at the quadrennial defense review for last year, the word innovation was used 33 times. unfortunately, it was often used as a synonym for "miracle." in this environment a word like innovate can become meaningless quickly. as you can tell from my wardrobe today i'm innovating right now. laugh leif all that's required is a basic lack of appreciation or respect for common dress standar standards. [ laughter ] >> so if all it takes to pursue innovation is good wardrobe i think i'm probably doing okay. i will never catch up to ben in terms of fashcial hair or accen so i've got a long way to go. this talk of innovation makes me think many of us have seen this movie before whether it be defense transformation or revolution and military affairs.

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innovation is another iteration on a similar then we've seen before. i don't raise this to say innovation is just another buzz worth we'll see have its moment in the sun and die out. but rather to say organizational change management at the pentagon is incredibly hard, let's face it. we've tried this before to some good effect but it takes incredibly strong leadership, a lot of dedicated folks inside the building who want that change to happen and, frankly, it takes really good branding so if innovation is going to live up to this branding of being in the qdr dozens of times or being in every senior leader's speech for the past two years it will have to do more than have this good branding and leadership supportment it has to change minds on the skeptics within the pentagon zblipts and if we think about what's happening in the pentagon, we can see a significant amount of good work using the rubric of innovation. we saw the deputy secretary of

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defense speak articulately and passionately and in meaningful ways about a number of things that fall under this rubric of innovation. initial to that, we have a number of initiatives buts that pre-date the innovation agenda, better buying power being a great example of that in addition to that we have standing organizations, organizations like dapa or the strategic capabilities office which are at the forefront of making investments today on innovative systems and thinking about innovation. and i think most notably we have the secretary of defense who's come in with a clear vision and a short timeline focused on innovation where he's pushing hard, establishing organizations like the defense innovation unit experimental in silicon valley. his force of the future initiatives but. this is a man pushing hard on this topic of innovation for good and sensible reasons. >> from this laundry list ben went through, i think we can agree that there is a tremendous

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amount of energy and opportunity related to the innovation agenda these days. but a lot of us, probably folks in the room and some critics, have some fair questions and fair points about the agenda starting with are these huge range of initiatives buts, are any of them in conflict? ben and i think, nope, they align well but the fact that there's confusion is an issue unto itself. secondly, does a leadership team have the bandwidth it needs to fully manage this agenda and have it have the impact they want it to have? third, can someone from the outside, like someone in silicon valley, look at this list of initiatives buts and say "i know where to go for what. who's on first, or who's going to be able to remove resources for me or carry water for me. so far from the feedback we're getting, not quite yet and frankly folks in the pentagon and industry are having the same questions. last lay, one of the prominent criticisms we see are on top of the bureaucratic process that

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already exists in the pentagon, the acquisition process, the procurement process requirements, programming, personnel, can the innovation agenda succeed when you're pairing it against these slow and cumbersome processes we're familiar with? all that said, ben and i think secretary carter and deputy secretary work have done a great job for creating space for the pentagon to get out of its comfort zone and innovate outside these processes and outside the traditional defense industry. however, we also think that their success is ultimately going to be judged on the amount of agility they're able to insert inside these core d.o.d. processes and how much impact -- wrather what's the longevity of these initiatives buts and the agenda going to be after they leave. diux is a great step, most of us would agree, but the pentagon is bureaucracy differently and risk averse even when it has

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leadership top cover and even when it has flexible authorities and programs built up. so the question comes down to what needs to happen in the next year to make sure this innovation agenda has staying power: exactly right. loren touched briefly on the diux, defense initiatives but experiment. no conversation would be complete without talking about the unrequited bromance between silicon valley and the department of defense. d.o.d. likes silicon valley. but that love isn't quite coming back yet. we'll get into that discussion in a mind. one of the things we have been focused on at cnas, michelle loren and i have spent a fire amount of time in silicon valley over the past couple of years. loren and i convened a working group throughout a couple months ago, our friend will goodman who's in the audience helped set that up. there are a number of key things that came out of that conversation. one of the things we asked the

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participants who were all entrepreneurs in silicon valley, many with d.o.d. or national security backgrounds, we asked them to do a predictive exercise, where did they think this kind of collaboration might go? the first thing that came out of this was sort of the pros and cons of high-level support for innovation and collaboration with silicon valley. that's very good from the perspective of lending legitimacy to an organization like the diux or allowing mid-level people in the organization to know it's okay to work with silicon valley. the down side could be in generating that momentum we create unrealistic expectations that we just can't meet. the diux and silicon valley writ large can't help to answer -- to supply all of the demand for innovation the department of defense has.

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when that doesn't happen, how will even feel about it? that was the second thing that came out of the predictive exercise which is the continued growth of the trend occurring which the participants referred to as technology tourism. for those of you who are not familiar, this is when senior officers or defense officials travel to silicon valley to "get briefed." they take a number of meetings, receive breeches, they don't have any funding of their own, they don't have the ability to execute on a contract and they won't come back to maintain that relationship over time. so they means they go out, raise expectations, dash those expectations, burn bridges and then when people within the pentagon or the services go out to silicon valley and seek to do business they're met with closed doors so we can see some of these things will continue to occur over the next couple of years. >> the final thing participants in this workshop are focused on

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is what happens when tech tourism goes well? what happens when you have a challenging and maybe urgent d.o.d. problem that meets up with an out-of-the-box solution whether from silicon valley or industry or elsewhere. can the pentagon follow up on a timetable that works for a startup or, frankly, even these days a time table that works for a defense industry or even for the pentagon itself. as ben has talked about, we have jennifers lined up behind the innovation agenda but are contracting officers? are program managerers? are they willing to or able to take advantage of the flexible authorities and new programs that secretary carter initiated? or are they incentivized to avoid them in a lot of ways? participants also asked, does d.o.d. have good examples of prototyping or failing fast? do they have models of what this behavior looks like? are they much more inclined to go back to their traditional and

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slower ways of doing business when they have a chance. can d.o.d. take these successes it may have and transition them and scale them to the larger enterprise or will they just impact a couple hundred folks or last a couple years then die on the vine? bottom line, participants wanted to know can the back-office functions of d.o.d. live up to the urgency you see in secretary carter's speeches? ben and i tend to think that technologically yes, it can. it has leadership, it does have flexible authorities, it's got resources but culturally this is up in the air. >> so with that big question out there, this sort of forces us to think what will we see over the coming 12 months of this administration and into the new administration? loren and i feel we have not yet hit peak innovation. you should expect to hear more discussion about this over the coming 12 months. and ultimately as we think about it, our general feeling is let's not get cynical too quickly. it's tempting, fun, there's

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great tweets we could send but while we know that this term, innovation, is going to become unfashionable at some point, we need to accept that. as lauren said at the beginning, change is very national guard the pentagon and part of that means we need buzz words and we need to get people behind this thing. we should not allow the good work being done under the rubric of innovation to be stymied based on our own frustration by a perceived lack of coherence or just because we want to be cool and it's easy in think tank land to complain about terms like innovation so let's not let cynicism be the enemy of good work and just as lauren -- so we're about to bring on thee other people to talk about that in more detail but i want you to take a moment to congratulate lauren schulman on an excellent presentation. thank you, lauren. [ applause ] so what we deal now is take a deeper dive into this conversation, bring more chairs up on stage. we have an excellent short panel

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with three experts michelle, who assume you're familiar with who has leadership in the pentagon and industry, daryl davis who leads boeing's phantom works organization and dr. jamie moran who runs kate and can provide a detailed understanding of how we program things in the pentagon. so we'll sit down and dig into a couple of these questions in detail. michelle, i would like to start with you. thinking about this from a leadership perspective. ty think there is a clear impetus to innovate. my question is how does one from a leadership position structure an agenda and move the building as we say in washington speak. >> i think the first step is to put a vision throughout and create a sense of urgency. one of the real strength this is

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the department of defense, off very mission-oriented work force. and i think what you've been hearing secretary carter and secretary work doing is try and make the case for why there's an urgent need to change the way we're doing business. why there's a need for innovation. you heard secretary work talk about a coming era of great power competition. that there are real challenges being posed by russia, by china that put our future military superiority into question. so this is a very real issue. it touches our vital interests and we need to do something about it. there is a window here, but that window won't stay open forever so i think the first thing is vision. but i do not -- and i think they've done a good job of that. then you have to start creating the mechanisms that allow the innovation to occur and here i think there's a work in progress. perhaps -- i know we'll talk a

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little bit more about this. but one of the things i don't see yet is a sortd of real effot to realign incentives for the people who are doing this work so they start to change behavior to get to a new set of objectives. absent that change of incentives, the training, the support, you're going to have the sort of current culture which is risk averse, which is wedded to these very slow deliberate systems. you're going to have that culture prevail. so i hope we can talk about this. how we might attack that. >> i think that's important. so you're talking about incentives at the individual level, essentially? >> yes. you have some very dedicated people who are mission focused who want to do the right thing but they're operating in a system that basically disincentivizes the majority of the behaviors necessary to get real innovation. so you have to get at that

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inconsistency. >> that makes sense. daryl, you run an organization that i actually appreciate. it doesn't say innovation in the job description. i think mark andreesen from anderson horrowitz has a genera investing philosophy that you should short any organization that has an innovation department. which is not you guys, which is reassuring. but it's highly innovative nonetheless. from your perspective as one who leads an organization like this, how do you believe that d.o.d. needs to change in order to allow you to innovate more effectively. >> that's a terrific question. one of the things we've tried to do in phantom works is create the culture of an agile learning organization. it's back to risk, willingness to take risk and what happens if you do fail. inform in fact, i think it was loren that said fail fast. and if you can multiply those

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experiences they are encouraged to take more risks and try more things. granted, this is a business. we have to return value to our shareholders and the department so it's important to risk the right things but if you're not willing to take that risk and that's part of what's happened in our business over the years is it's become very slow, very methodical, very process constrained and even to the extent that as we go after some thing what is we will find from an industry perspective is that the requirements are reduced to the lowest possible point where innovation is not valued sometimes. in fact, breakthroughs are not valued because you reduce things to the lowest common denominator in the interest of having fair and open competition. but if you're not willing to take the risk, that's why one of our main customers is darpa. we spent a lot of time with darpa trying to understand how do we take risks to change the game and how do we create a culture where our people can learn all the time and are constantly learning with agility. >> i think that's right.

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so jamie, you've heard a number of us prost no-- prognosticatin. i'm interested on your thoughts on the innovation agenda within the building and your read from your vantage point. >> well, your dress code today is a good jumping off point for that because in the pentagon we are capable of wearing casual clothes but we require written instruction if we're going to do it. [ laughter ] my only regret is you didn't provide written instruction. >> i'm sorry. actually, no one told me this was okay or not okay, this is just how i dress. >> so that's actual innovation. it's a great question and i feel like we are starting down a path towards the buzz word of innovation but it's a buzz word made up of a bunch of individual choices, a bunch of individual actions, a bunch of individual

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programs and a shift in how people engage their jobs and approach the problem we set in front of them. that's the cultural shift i think secretary carter and deputy secretary work are trying to drive. it's not innovation, innovation, innovation. it's everybody coming at it with a different tone of voice, a different tempo and applying it to different problems. that's key. in my line of work, the programming and analytics, we've got to is pull a bunch of bright ideas together and the reputation cape has, we're the place you go to get no for an answer. because we were set up as an organization to be institutional skeptics. secretary mcnamara set up the organization to question the bright ideas, to drive change but also to test ideas that

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represented change because we've got the national security at stake here. fast failure is something we have to do in the department of defense at a low level, at a small inches level. it's something we can not afford to do at a grand institutional level. the country can't tolerate that. we have to figure out much like many large companies in the technology sphere and manufacturing and other words, we have to figure out how to innovate at an appropriate level knowing that betting the company is probably not appropriate when you're a half trillion dollar a year plus enterprise like we are. yet if you can't make those bets at a small level we will gradually over time use your relevance and your efficacy. >> i often think about this with the -- i was giving testimony to the senate arms services committee the other day and i thought imagine if i was representing a vc and describing how my financial portfolio

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performed, essentially i i frittered 80% of my funds away on bubble gum and cds because i thought they were coming back but i got a three extra turn on 220%. i don't think i would get a pat on the back from senator mckand. there would be questions about what happened to that 80%. >> mathematically you got a 3x on 20% and lost 80% you'd probably get fired. >> yeah, whatever. mccain. that's why you're at cape. but you raise important points coming back to culture and personnel. so from your experience from a leadership perspective and implementing things to what extent do you think we should focus efforts on personal and organizational structures. how do we make it real for the people who can then move the organization forward. >> again, i think, you know, too often we rush towards redrawing the organizational chart because it's so much fun. [ laughter ] but when the real issue may be

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incentives, authorities, retraining and rewarding people differently and so when i think about what's at the core of innovation. you have to have a pretty healthy space and tolerance for competition of ideas. one of the challenges i saw in the pentagon overseaing -- working with cape but on the policy side for force planning, for example, this is drive towards consensus and sometimes it feels like the tyranny of consensus that getting everybody to agree is more important than the quality of the actual outcome you're producing. so if you really want to deal with some of the challenges that bob work was describing. we need to create a safe space that allows services, industry, joint staff, osd, come one, come all. let's compete ideas about how we're going to solve a plan channel and let that competition of ideas get tested out in

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further concept development, in war gaming, in experimentation and so forth. that's the stage where stuff can be tried and fail without too much real risk or cost. but to do that, you've got to have a different mind-set and i think some of that is training people to operate differently and developing a cadre what really knows how to structure and run a competition like that. some of it is incentivizing and rewarding people for taking those risks and producing -- even if it's failed something, if we learned a lot from it that's a win. and hold it up as such. then when you get to starting to prototype and looking towards what are you going to put in the program the next challenge is the valley of death between a really great darpa project or something that the phantom works is doing and into the program of

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record because all of the institutional anti-bodies come out and try to kill it before it takes dollars away from the legacy program. so there are a whole series of challenges there but i think if you lay out the sort of end-to-hend process and really think hard about have i trained the people and incentivized the behavior i want at each step of that chain? you may or may not have to do a big organizational change. it may be more about just creating a different is up culture. you can't change -- you will never change the dominant culture but trying to create a healthy subculture that gets you across that chain of activity to actually some new and different ideas and programs. >> it makes sense. i think more of the grand canyon of death for the -- a mere valley doesn't seem significant enough. but one of the things we often talk about here and a lot of my work focuses on the significance

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of commercial technology is, daryl from your perspective, you're an interesting organization that you're part of a business that has significant commercial part and equally significant defense part. just your thoughts on is that real and if it is real in what ways are you able to innovate based on having access to both of those markets. >> terrific question because living inside the boeing company in our small organization with the learning culture that we have, we have access to biged bl aircraft where innovation is happening all the time. it doesn't happen fast but it's happening constantly. where we can tap into that massive machine that's innovating and manufacturing in composites, in autonomous manufacturing and those kinds of things, it's powerful for where we can be the together take it to the department in certain places. outside of that there's a number

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of places where we touch silicon valley, we touch cambridge innovation center, we touch universities and one of the largest things we have in the boeing portfolio is our intellectual property portfolio and there are tons of things that we as aerospace engineers and commercial airplane or military airplane providers will never see a commercial application for some of those things so we spent significant time understanding through venture capitalists, through entrepreneurs and there's a big difference between an entrepreneur an an innovator and how can you tap into that? by the way, some of those big ideas we've seen have a play back into the department of defense or into other places. so we spend a lot of time, it isn't a lot of money but the exciting part for us is it challenges our young engineers and entrepreneurs to start thinking about the business differently. in fact, you have to create that safe haven which is really important for those people to think big and dream big and at

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the same time be willing to take bets. so we spent a lot of time and, in fact, a little company that we acquired over a decade ago was a commercial uas company that became a fee-for-service application in the war in iraq that we actually acquired the company. but it wasn't because we were looking at uas differently. we found the small company that had an innovative product and we found a way with them to take it to the marketplace. so innovation is not just about technology, it's business model, people, environment, safe havens, willing to take risk but we're doing it constantly and where we can leverage the power of our intellectual properties across the department and out into the commercial environment there are great opportunities. >> that's great. one of the challenges in hosting a conversation on a topic i find this interesting with people of this quality is that we run out of time quickly. so we're coming up on a hard stop here. i'll leave time for one question so come up with one genius

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question. so i want to talk about two perspectives. one thing we often see is a lot of lofty language coming from the pentagon and those of us who follow the pentagon closely, follow where the money goes. the other thing i'm interested in the point loren raised. how will the pentagon be changed as part of this innovation agenda? i'll be interested on thoughts from you about is funding being r reallocated, associated with this? sand that for institutions part of the core of the pentagon or are we seeing things that are being spun off outside of the pentagon. >> that's a great question. the key to understanding how to approach the problem is thinking in terms of portfolio. so we have to start by thinking of innovation as a broad overarching construct into which there's changes in stuff.

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even core organizational cultures, it takes decades. what are the concepts for utilizing the tools they have. whether they have human, individual individuals, whether they are hardware tools, then you have to think about the stuff. but the stuff portfolio a huge piece of our department of defense expenditure. something the congress and tax payer have a right to think we're -- right to know we're thinking about vigorously.

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and the critical piece is thinking about the portfolio as a portfolio if you have a financial manager for a company or individual you are looking tv portfolio that has a variety of risks. so as we look towards technological opportunity, i'm looking at three or four different ways of getting after it, i'm looking at how to take existing capital investments we have already in the inventory or coming into the inventory and use them differently or augment them. that can be enormously important. i'm looking at how can i modify the next generation of something like that in a way that breaks out of a paradigm or drives us to do something in a fundamentally friend way that is really effective. then i'm looking at radical

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innovation that completely takes us out of our sbising understanding. we want a mix of all of those because we have to be ready for short term, medium term and long term and we know as you go across that sort of spectrum of riskiness and degree of change and across that spectrum of time that each of those has a successively lower probability of coming true in the way you laid it out. we have to be capable of failing at those incremental levels. at those individual aegis levels and we have to accept as you're looking 30 years out, talking about the kinds of things deputy secretary work talked about this morning, human machine autonomy and the like, some of that is more speculative, more risky, but we have to get after it in a way that leaves us open to success in a wide range of potential futures. portfolio thinking is key. we've been doing a series of

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strategic portfolio reviews, looking at areas like deterrence. looking at areas like space and looking at them in a very deliberate portfolio context to make the smartest choices. >> no pressure, someone will come up with an impressive and insight for question. >> good morning. for the last 25 years acquisition has gotten slower. we have built less with more money, we all know the basics. you have other transaction authorities, you have lots of ways you can do these things. why don't we as we pursue the third offset do something radical where we create effectively a third offset darpa

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with they are given a pot of money, yes we can talk toing on about oversight and let them do it? i mean, there's so many authorities already existing. it's a command organization. can't we stand up and create a safe space for them that way? >> everyone's looking at you, jamie. >> the crux of your question is can't we have somebody and have them do it? and the challenge there is what is "it"? to tell somebody to go out and do it you have to define it and so -- and "it" is something which is fought by men and women in uniform operating complex

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environments and a point solution, command solution to those problems that is set loose and runs and produces something six month, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months later: it's a part of the answer but it can't be the whole of the answer. it can't be the whole of the answer because you're talking about tools, hardware that operates in the context of complex human endeavor and so i think we absolutely need to use some of our specific acquisition tools and techniques to get at things faster. it was mentioned earlier i think loren mentioned the strategic capabilities office. they've done great work in figuring out how to make existing stuff do novel things. and there's huge room for innovation there that is i think delivering substantial improvement. but i'm not going to go out and

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ask somebody to design the successor to the joint strike fighter alone in a small think tank and have them produce it and sell it to us as a commercial item. it's not going to happen. it's not going to work. because we can't have enduring competition year after year for those kinds of things and the scale is too high. so it's an important piece of the portfolio, but not the hole history. >> so colin that was such an impressive question that the time gods have given us extra time. i'm going to take the first prerogative and ask michelle a question while you gather your thoughts and ask similarly impressive questions. michelle i wanted to come back to the silicon valley conversation. you've talked to interesting people. what potential is there and what's the quid pro quo? it's fairly clear to those of us in washington what we get out of

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it. what from your perspective can we provide to that community that makes it worth their while in terms of collaborating with us? >> i think the potential for collaboration is there. i think there are a couple of key challenges. one is there is a trust deficit post snowden. even though that is something that we won't spend a lot of time on here but suffice it to say that we have to climb back from that and i think there's some trust building that has to go on between the number of parts of the u.s. government and parts of the valley. second is we have to -- there has to be a business case. particularly for smaller -- for every company but particularly for the more innovative earlier in their development companies. there has to be a business case to work with the u.s. government and a lot of times their vcs

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take a look at this and say "are you crazy? this makes no sense whatsoever. stay away from the government if you possible can. so we have to do with that in terms of intellectual property, we have to create paths where obstacles to much more rapid and responsive procurement, sort of being able to procure multiple generations of something over time. this is particularly acute in the it area and the applications area. we have to move at a different cycle rate to make the base case real for them and then it gets back to people again. we have to have trained people in d.o.d. who know how to work with this part of the economy which is different, operates on different times and rules and so forth but we have to have some people out there who can be liaisons and help them understand how to work with this fearful -- the fear inspiring

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gigantic beast of the u.s. government. so i think it can be done and i think there are people who frankly out of patriotism and determination are bridging the gap and making it work. you can find lots of small examples but we need to figure out how to do this at scale and, oh, by the way, innovation is not owned by silicon valley. we need to also be going to major defense industry to other parts of the country where it's the 128 corridor in boston or what have you to find multiple paths to leverage what's going on out there. >> i think that's exactly right. i can't see hands up so i'll take this opportunity to ask daryl your thoughts on the same thing. you have books out there. one of the thing that has struck me in conversations with you and your colleagues is the advantagings large organizations have here. it's hard for a startup to get involved in building cumbersome materials or undertaking manufacturing at scale.

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i'm interested in your thoughts on what advantages are there for your organization in collaborating with silicon valley and what the benefits are for them. >> so terrific and thanks. a lot of interesting things happen when we have the opportunity to engage with silicon valley and it isn't limited to silicon valley because it's everywhere and it's on a global scale and, in fact, through some of our entities in boeing defense that are overseas we have great research and development centers in madrid, in australia, india and other parts of the world. the challenge for us is to find the two ideas that click in an innovation environment where the sum of one plus one equals 11 and not two or three. and that comes down to people and it is that geometric effect when a big idea is augustment inned with someone else by other big ideas and it's back to that collaborative environment you mentioned. when we see those things happen the question for us as leaders becomes instead of sighing why

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would you do that? why not would you do that? enabling people to take the risk and see it's not the fail fast, it's take a step and see if it can mean something and if it can, go farther. and that's where it becomes important through some of the -- molly and sam experiment capabilities where you can test things, whether it's in a simulated environment and then can you do it in a way that you can mature it because you are protecting the enterprise. you have to protect the enterprise and when you can harness commercial leverage that way it can geometrically scale rapidly. that's part of the long process we face somedays in the department of defense. we can find ways to work not around it but with it. colin, to your question on the ota, when you can partner with the department you can do things differently. so innovation and business models with the department. and congress has a very big say in how do you do that as well. >> there was a sign being flashed at me that says "lost question." i'm going to follow that sign.

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there's a hand up in the back on this side. a microphone coming to you, sir. >> james drew from flight global. particularly to boeing phantom works. as you look at six gen fighters, what are the big technology or the main technology that you're going to pull out of your hat and offer to the sfwlorld. >> i'm sure that all of the programs you guys are working on, we'll talk about that right now. >> i have nothing to offer on that. actually, i think the deputy secretary said it best in his five tenets of the third offset strategy. autonomy, deep machine learning. today i would tell you from where we sit, six gen air dominance, it's not about airplanes just yet.

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it's about a system of systems and how will from the minute you indicate or see a threat how do you counter that threat with multiple tools in your kit pack, from cyber to electronic warfare. so there's a lot of innovative thinking going on. the challenge for us in industry will be working with the department to understand how best to take on those challenges with the competitive environment, be it russia or china. how will we do that as a nation with our allies. >> if i could add one point on that as we wrap. the department is really trying to think rigorously about reducing risk as we look toward that transition. there's a lot of unknown as we look to that future transition. you heard the deputy talk about the key ones, but we are looking at identifying where the bureaucratic, cultural, technological risks along that path and how can we make focused, modest investment or focus modest changes to how we

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do bid that will enable that transition knowing it will be a matter of decades. >> that's excellent. thank you to this excellent panel for talking in practical terms about a somewhat inchoate topic. so if we could thank these guys for their time. [ applause ] coming up in a little over 45 minutes, federal reserve chair janet yellen will be holding a news conference to discuss monetary policy and the nation's economic status. live coverage at 2:30 p.m. eastern here on c-span 3. >> american history tv, every weekend on c-span 3. saturday night at 8:00 eastern, on lectures in history, louisiana state university history professor andrew burstein on the enlightenment era in the united states. a time prior to the american revolution whose emphasis was scientific reasoning and ideas that shape the politics and morals of that generation.

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>> he starts out in 1727 by establishing the junto, judge men's improvement club. these were about improving their community, about individual morals, they would read books and share ideas and these were young men like himself not born to wealth but who believed it was possible to rely on yourself, study, and get ahead in society. >> sunday morning at 10:00 on road to the white house rewind we look back at the 2,000 campaign of george w. bush, his announcement to run while in new hampshire and his visits to eliminate stand, tour of local small businesses and a pumpkin festival. bush went on to win the general election, defeating al gore. and later at 4:00 on "reel america" the 1958 army film entitled "why nato" about why it

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was formed and the efforts by dwight eisenhower to convince 12 other nations to support. >> it in december 1950, the north atlantic council decided to give sufficient authority to organize, equip, and train an integrated nato force for the defense of europe. the task before him was unprecedented. those each nato countries would see to the supply and support of its own national forces, the supreme commander would be responsible for their coordination into a single international force. >> at 8:00, author catherine clinton on the changing historical narratives of mary todd lincoln, the possibility of how she would have been remembered if she had died instead of her husband and why some of her critics have labelled her as crazy. for our complete schedule, go to cspan.org. all persons having business before the honorable the supreme court of the united states doctor r admonished to draw near

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and give they are attention. monday on c-span's "landmark cases," we'll look at the case on one of the most divisive issues to come before the supreme court, abortion. >> rowe against wade was decided in january, 1973. it is a case that is controversial, that is constantly under scrutiny and there is a question, i suppose, where it ever will cease to be under scrutiny. >> wanting to terminate an unwanted pregnancy but unable to because of a texas state law banning abortion, unmarried dallas carnival mccrrvey agreed to be the plaintiff. requesting she remain anonymous, the lawsuit listed her as jane roe and the defendant charged with enforcing the ban was

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dallas county district attorney henry wade. while she had the baby and put it up for adoption, her case made it all the way to the supreme court. >> jane roe, the pregnant woman, had gone to several dallas physicians seeking an abortion but had been prefused care because of the texas law. she filed suit on behalf of herself and all those women who have in the past at that present time or in the future would seek termination of a pregnancy. we'll discuss the court's decision in roe v. wade its impact then and now with our guest clarke forsythe, senior counsel of "americans united for life" and "abuse of discretion, the untold story of roe v. wade." and melissa murray, former law clerk for sonia sonia sotomayor prior to her appointment before the supreme court. that's live at 9:00 eastern on c-span, c-span 3 and c-span

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radio. for background on each case while you watch, order your copy of the landmark cases companion book available for $8.95 plus shipping at cspan.org/landmarkcases. more now from this forum on the defense industry. a former congressional staffer joins defense and nation nag security policy experts to discuss potential reforms for the pentagon. at this event hosted by the center for new american security and defense one. after wards they answer questions for the audience. >> good morning, everyone. i won't be sitting down so no one will get to see those socks. so typically at the last three conferences i've done, i've been the moderated panel before the end of the day today. i'm moved up a little bit but it's the one right before lunch. so we'll get you through this

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and get you guys some good. so in addition to the seemingly voracious pace of military operations these days, one of the biggest things being talked about at the pentagon is reform and basically in three key areas. we're talking structural reform so we've seen congress and the pentagon looking at goldwater nichols. we've seen personnel reform in secretary carter's force of the future and has been medical and paying benefits type reforms as well and lastly acquisition form in which finally we saw some legislation this year that's been put -- written into law. so we have a great panel here with us today as mentioned. phil carter, director of military veterans and society programs at cnas, mckenzie elan from american enterprise institu institute, steve andra, retired army battlefield doc and senior vice president and chief medical officer of health care service corporation and retired general

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craig mckinney, ceo and president of ndia and former dae director of the national guard bureau. thank you for joining us today. i'll throw some questions out to the panel. nothing specific for any of you, any of you can go after this first one. what are we trying to accomplish with these reforms? what are the major benefits that would come to the military from tackling reforms in these three key areas? >> i'll jump in. so basically -- there was a tide that turned about seven or eight years ago when the republican part y party threw out its role as the white knight for defense hawks everywhere and the republican party said "we're not going to profit unilaterally or artificially anymore." so then you saw what we see today but it manifested long before the tea party or even this president took office. there were challenges within the

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gop about -- concern about larger federal spending and other priorities like poverty that are taking sort of top attention of policymakers so that policymakers. and so that sort of began the fraying of the national security consensus, rise of the libertarian moment with the tea party and of course the left and right started combining. we saw not just the product of the budget control act to start the defense drawdown in 2010, but we also saw them coming together as a voting majority of congress. with the barney frank amendment for example on cut defense. and that has been the state of this is you for almost a decaded. so why is it reform, reform, reform all the time even though it's probably the most dull topic you will cover today? not because we aren't interested in it, meaning dull relatively speaking. there isn't an additional dollar for defense anymore for the

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foreseeable future without a reform agenda. >> and i think that's what we're trying to accomplish to give the accident of defense flexibility. we've talked about new strategies, but the real lubery capit lubricant. but without reform, there wouldn't be the money. health care has gone from 6% to 10% of the d.o.d. budget. one out of every ten dollars is going to health care. you certainly want to deliver on the faith to our fight fighting force but we have to do it in a more efficient way. >> and i certainly agree with my colleagues that those who represent industry want to make sure that we understand the playing field, understand what is out there in terms of modernization, recapitalization. some of the acquisition reform

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that was enacted last year was a positive step, but like everything else, we have to continue to go further. for 15 years we've been involved in counter sur against city operations. you've heard chief of staff millie say that may not be the next war that we need to plan for. so this is a wonderful time to have these discussions and i commend you to putting the panel together. >> we'll go back to medical in a minute. let's talk with some of the goldwater/nichols drills that are being done by both the senate and in the pentagon. it seems every few years or so, journalists like myself will write a story about changing of cocom lines and merging north com and south com and european command in africa and people will debate this. so what are some of the major structural reforms that the pentagon can benefit from? >> one of the problems we're

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trying to solve, reforms are simply good ideas in search of a problem. and i think we start with the reform, we do it backwards. we have certain problems will in the force that are apparent after 15 years of war. speed is one. it took us three or four years depending on how you count to go from the invasion of iraq to a successful strategy in iraq. we can't afford a three or four year reaction time for our military to innovate operationally and tactically on the ground. the same is true in the acquisition side. speed is not a success or a virtue of our acquisition system. so that is a problem we can fix through acquisition reform, command reform, flattening of combatant command and so forth. on the personnel side, i think this is where the force of the future effort has stalled. there has not been a successful case made yet for the problems we're trying to solve, whether they're costs, recruiting,

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quality or the need to develop intellectual capital. so until we start with the president oba problem statement and build at least agreement, we'll be searching for good ideas without an anchor. >> that's interesting. because if you read senator mccain and senator reid's chairman of the senate armed services committee and ranking member, their background memo for the hearing effort, they swear they're not a solution in search of a problem. however, i don't know that they fully explained exactly what it is. i can tell you knowing the chairman that this really goes back to a lot of the things that were identified in the 2010 qdr independent panel and things we already know as evidenced in the acquisition reform, which is there is a widespread belief that there has been disproportionate growth in civilian defense manpower, that includes contractors, federal contractors who provide services

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to the defense department, but it also includes government civilians. and it also includes uniformed personnel who are assigned and tasked out and basically never come back, but the chief loses them, whether to a task force or cocom or something else. there is also belief that services over time have lost some of their core authorities and osd has become too centralized and powerful and that the services need to regain some authority from -- or new authority, it wouldn't look like the past. so these are some of the c challenges they're trying to fix. >> some of my fellow service chiefs ing thini think got a li scared up front seeing some of the initiatives that are weren't fully disclosed. and that will be trouble in the last year of the administration. how many new things can we

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digest as we get ready for the next administration. >> that's a great point you brought up, there is about 13 months left in this administration. we're going into a presidential election rear. and this is a really ambitious agenda this that is out there. what is reality that any of this could get implemented? >> i think the discussion s frame the problem fairly well? coming from a uniform background, the department of defense has unique problems right now.are fighting a viciou enemy and yet we have all he's other issues that chief of staff pointed out. that should give us all pause that we have a lot of work do, but folks in the pentagon will get the job done day by day. many of these ideas will be long term, midterm to long term, not

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necessarily overnight solutions. >> general, i'll stick can you for one more on a structural issues. one of the big thing that the pep pentagon has been try doingyou for one more on a structural issues. one of the big thing that the pentagon has been try doingwiyon for one more on a structural issues. one of the big thing that the pentagon has been try doingthyo can for one more on a structural issues. one of the big thing that the pentagon has been try doing you can for one more on a structural issues. one of the big thing that the pentagon has been try doingyouc structural issues. one of the big thing that the pentagon has been try doingan f structural issues. one of the big thing that the pentagon has been try doingyoun for one more on a structural issues. one of the big thing that the pentagon has been try doing for one more on a structural for one more on a structural issues. shrink the size of offices, as they call it the back office. when you were in the pentagon, what made that so challenging for you to actually implement? >> well, i think a lot of the panelists have talked about culture today and the culture of the services, the culture of the civilian workforce, the culture of the leadership. very hard to change that culture of divesting of significant portions of staffs that have been built up over time. even a small organization like the national guard, our large bureau grew from 450 people in the early '80s to almost 4,000

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people here in washington. thousand, those are people that have been taken out of the states, the governors don't have those people working day to day for natural disaster emergency. so it just happens over time and it will take a very decisive leader who watches the shell game of personnel where you move people to make sure that they do strength of staffs. because it's very important to do it. >> mackenzie, the british just finished this big strategic defense and security review and i guess it's akin to the qdr that we do here, the strategy review that led into the defense strategic guidance. one thing tahat struck me is tht it pointed to specific platforms and equipment that they wanted to buy which our strategy reviews tend do less of. is it time that the pentagon possibly looks at that, a review of that kind of scale to maybe tackle some of these issues to

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maybe get away from some of these fragmented efforts? >> i think so. and i think no one said it better than michelle last week in her testimony about how the process of generating the defense review has been very watered down on the lowest common denominator consensus building effort. and which yields a product which is pretty weak. because there is a little piece of it for everyone in it. and it's not -- it lacks a lot of clarity or prioritization. i think the sdsr is really well done and i think partly because it's a shift in where the last review went and so partly because of what it says. but i break with you the comprehensive nature of it is admirable. they also tackle different issues like civilian manpower, as well. i do think there is shall value in starting to name names. because in procurement and in

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the future. partly because anybody who just spends two minutes looking at the defense budget can figure out what d.o.d. officials and senior pentagon leaders won't say, but we all know. for example, i'll just put it out there, the joint strike fighters absolutely aren't affordable as it is. ho the math doesn't lie. but for political reasons and program stability and projecting that to allies, et cetera, et cetera, partly because of decisions made under previous secretaries of defense that made this program too big to fail, that there are no alternatives to it, for a lot of reasons this program is politically protected. it's also a capability that we need. how far, there are some challenges in terms of what can be done particularly as the nuclear triad comes on democratic line. and that wedge is huge. it's a wake-up call i believe mr. ma mccord call it is and it